Ableton Live Instrument Racks

Hi all, I’ve spent a bit of time this year working on a commercial Ableton Live pack, being released by Loopmasters, in conjunction with School of Synthesis.

The Analogue Sequences Live Pack utilises sequences created from some of School of Synthesis’s vast collection of classic vintage and modern analogue synthesisers. This collection includes sequences expertly programmed for the Korg MS20, ARP 2600, Roland Jupiter 6, DSI/Sequential Prophet 6, Roland SH2, Moog Sub37 and Sid Station. All synths have been processed through Bettermaker EQ and Manley NuMu and recorded through Burl Mothership.

It’s a pretty sweet sounding collection of loops, but is also way more than that, as they have all been re-imagined into Ableton Instrument racks, allowing for realtime manipulation, re-sequencing and performance via from Ableton Push, or any other MIDI Controller.

I spent some time recently sampling the amazing PPG Wave 2.3 at the wonderful MESS Foundation. It is a fantastic organisation with an extensive Vintage Synth collection, and very reasonable subscription rates which allows you to access some amazing pieces of Electronic Music’s history.

The PPG Wave 2.3, is a visually striking and aurally exciting early digital/wavetable synthesiser from the early 1980s. It’s not a particularly intuitive instrument, but has a certain kind of beauty in its glitches and a very musical randomness in its timbre.

After 4 hours recording time, I felt that I only started to scratch the surface of it, but from some of these recordings I have created these 3 multi-sample sampler instruments for Ableton Live 9.2, available as a Live Pack that you can download for free.

If you’ve downloaded my “Vocoder for Push” racks, then you should understand the concept behind these racks… basically they’re performance orientated racked instruments that hack the external instrument and external effect devices to be able to pre-map the audio routings. By default audio input 1 is used as the mic source, but you can change this if you want.

In this Live set there are two instrument racks, one for Errorsmith’s “Razor”, and the other for Tim Exile’s “The Mouth”. Both devices require a license and the Reaktor 5 Player available via nativeinstruments.com.

This is my (nearly) 3 year old daughter singing through The Mouth – “Autoharmonious” Rack.

I’m giving away five instrument racks based on sounds off my new EP Tiny tidal waves.

Rather than providing instruments that would just play the sounds from the EP, I thought it’d be much more interesting to create a new instrument from each track.

What you get is a collection of instrument racks created from the key elements of each track, re-contextualised into new Ableton instruments. The intention is that they will be useful in a variety of contexts, whilst retaining the flavour of my immersive, shoe-gaze, soundscape vibe.

If you dig deep into the racks, hopefully you’ll find some techniques that will inspire you in the creation of your own instrument racks.

Setting up the Vocoder to work ‘out of the box’ with Ableton’s Push controller was a challenge that I set myself.

For anyone who has used the Vocoder in Live 9 before, you should know that you by default, need two channels, one Midi and one Audio, and they need to have channel routings set up in a particular fashion to make them work.

This doesn’t work so well when you want to load a ready to go Vocoder directly from Push. So, I worked out a way to use Live’s External FX device within an Instrument rack to allow audio to be sent into a Midi channel.

You can download the live set for free here, and watch the youtube video below for more information on how to ensure it works correctly for your needs.

This is the fifth instalment of my Music and Sounds project, where I give away free sounds and Ableton Live project files. This one contains two Ableton Drum Racks and two Convolution FX Racks that use samples of Rocks and Metals that I found when on holidays in The Grampians Mountain Ranges.

The *Metal* rack was created from a pile of rusty old tools I found by a shed, I hit, scraped and dropped various metals against other metals.

The *Rocks* were scraped, dropped and thrown to create thumps, clunks and clicks.

The samples themselves are pretty straight forward, but I hope that you’ll dig a little deeper inside the racks to see how it is all constructed so that when you start playing with the Macros, a whole different world of sounds can be created by some creative FX routings.

I’ve also played around a bit with samples within Max For Live’s Convolution reverb, to create some very strange, but evocative *convolution FX racks*

So, I’ve been really busy with music over the last few months demoing and compiling new tracks to go on what was originally going to be a short 5 or 6 track EP… but then I got a bit carried away, and it looks like this collection of tracks is going to end up being another album 🙂

I actually really like the format of an album, perhaps this is because I grew up listening to LPs and Cassette tapes, where tracks always were in the same order… though I have to admit, sometimes the shuffle function on my iPod spits out some pretty amazing musical synchronicity!

Anyway… the fourth as yet un-named Winterpark album is currently taking shape, and I’m really happy with how it’s sounding so far… I’m looking towards a mid year release if all goes according to plan. In creating this new album, I’ve been experimenting with live looping and the creation of atmospheric textures from electric guitar.

This Ableton Instrument has been created from one of these Loops. The original guitar loop has a pitch-shifting reverb drenched sound, that classic Eno-esque ‘Bloom’ sound. When I transformed this into a sampler based instrument rack, I noticed that wherever you play it on the keyboard you can get some really interesting and diverse textures. I hope you enjoy it!

Here are a couple of Midi FX plugins that I created for the Enable Music Theory for Electronic Musicians session I presented at in December.

The idea is to have a series of Midi FX racks which allow you to use single key strokes or button pushes to create lush evolving chords.

With *Epic Chord Rack* you can switch between major and minor, and increase the harmonic overtones of either the Harmony, or Tonic notes in the chord, as well as control to tweak the Maximum velocity out, which can come in handy if you start pushing the velocity messages up too high.

*Note Remover* uses a trick of three velocity plugins in a row, with various settings to randomly remove the number of notes that the chord plugin splits out.The Macros give you the option to have either more or notes in the chord as well as an output velocity level.

*Re-Voice* basically ensures that all notes will always sit within about a two octave range, no matter what the incoming note message is. You can assign an octave range via the Macro.

*Racked Scale* is a couple of scale plugins conveniently grouped together and macro-mapped so you can change between Major and Minor Scale shape, transpose your scale anywhere within a two octave range, and change into any of the diatonic modes within a major or minor scale via the Base Macro.

If you have any further questions, feel free to write a reply and I’ll do my best to answer! and if you find this useful, and want to support the creation of these FX, please consider donating a dollar!

I had a rather significant birthday a few months back, and amongst some really cool gifts, I received a boxful of bells (thanks Mum and Dad!). They’re those sort that are decorative/ornamental, and if you check out the picture below you can probably see why they ended up in the Op Shop 😉

But they sound great if their own strange way, and I’ve been intending to record them and then slow the dinging sound down to create weird soundscape instruments from them. So, today I finally got around to sampling and manipulating the recordings, and am pretty chuffed with the results. I’ve turned these bells into two instruments; the first plays rhythmic glitchy patterns, and the second is more atmospheric.

You can hear what both these instruments sound like together via the Soundcloud player below